Key takeaways:
- CoinEx’s hot wallets were hacked on September 12th, with attackers siphoning an estimated $70 million worth of digital assets
- The exchange suspended withdrawals following the attack and has said that the withdrawals will re-enabled after the recovery process is completed
- According to a statement published on September 16th, wallet upgrades will be finalized next week, and the withdrawals will gradually resume in phases upon passing security checks
CoinEx suspends withdrawals after $70 million hack
On September 12th, cryptocurrency exchange CoinEx suffered an exploit in which $70 million worth of digital assets were siphoned from the exchange’s hot wallets. The list of impacted digital assets includes BTC, ETH, XRP, BCH, SOL, and others. The exchange said that the hack impacted cryptocurrencies in hot wallets exclusively and that cold wallet funds have not been affected.
After the attack, suspected to have been carried out by the North Korea-linked Lazarus Group, CoinEx suspended user withdrawals and warned users against depositing funds to old addresses before the recovery process is finalized.
CoinEx has suspended withdrawals following the attack. Withdrawals will be reenabled after the recovery process is completed. Image source: CoinEx
In an effort to reassure the users that funds are safe and shed light on the current state of the recovery process, CoinEx published a comprehensive blog post on the hot wallet hack on Medium.
Here’s what CoinEx wrote about when user withdrawals will be re-enabled:
“We aim to finalize wallet upgrades next week, after which withdrawals will gradually resume in phases upon passing stringent security checks. Our team is currently focused on building and deploying an entirely new and robust wallet system to handle activities within the 211 chains and 737 assets.”
According to CoinEx’s official statement, “users’ assets have NOT been, and will NOT be affected in this attack.” In addition, the exchange plans to bear full financial losses from the incident.
On Friday, CoinEx CEO and founder Haipo Yang expressed his sincere regrets about the incident to affected users via his personal Twitter account. Among other things, the CEO assured that there are two priorities for the CoinEx team in the coming days – building a new wallet system and resuming withdrawals.
Leading my team, these are our top priorities in the coming days:
1. Building a new wallet system.
2. Resuming withdrawals.
I assure you: every affected user will be compensated 100%.Your assets with CoinEx remain safe. That’s our commitment to all of you.— Haipo Yang (@yhaiyang) September 14, 2023
You can check our previous article if you want to learn more about the CoinEx hot wallet hack.
It is worth noting that the exchange’s native CoinEx Token (CET) dipped on the day of the attack from $0.030 to $0.025. Since then, CET has recovered some of its losses and currently trades at $0.028.
